What to know about claims Palantir is creating a national database of US citizens

Yahoo

19 hours ago

In late May 2025, a New York Times article detailed a supposed combined effort between the U.S. federal government and the data analysis software company Palantir to centralize data on American citizens.
Palantir rebutted the allegations in a statement on X and in a blog post, arguing that the New York Times story overstated Palantir's ties to the Trump administration — particularly to the cost-cutting Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiative — and that the company does not collect data to "unlawfully surveil" Americans.
Using USASpending, the publicly available database for federal government spending, Snopes found that Palantir received between $228 million and $542 million in government contracts per year between 2020 and 2024, mostly with the Defense Department. While we were not able to confirm the details of all of these contracts, some departments and agencies reportedly use Palantir's Foundry product for data management.
Comments from former DOGE figurehead Elon Musk implied that one of the initiative's goals is to compile and centralize data on American citizens. DOGE could easily use Palantir's powerful data tools to construct such a database or create connections between existing government data. A March executive order and two June Supreme Court rulings would also help facilitate that work.
We found no evidence that Palantir itself was compiling any master database, as social media posts claimed.
On May 30, 2025, The New York Times published an article titled "Trump Taps Palantir to Compile Data on Americans," detailing a supposed combined effort between the U.S. federal government and the data software company Palantir to centralize data on American citizens.
Data privacy advocates did not take the news well, calling it "dystopian" and a massive invasion of privacy.
Four days later, Palantir posted a statement to X responding to the article, calling the reporting "blatantly untrue" because "Palantir never collects data to unlawfully surveil Americans, and our Foundry platform employs granular security protections."
On June 9, 2025, the company followed up with a long blog post on X titled "Correcting the Record: Responses to the May 30, 2025 New York Times Article on Palantir," which aimed to fact-check the article. (Snopes began researching this story before this blog post was released. We reached out to Palantir for comment but have not yet heard back; if we do, we will update this story.)
Since the May 30 article came out, a claim based on the reporting began circulating on social media — namely, that U.S. President Donald Trump or someone in his administration contracted Palantir to create a master database of all U.S. citizens.
In this article, we aim to check the accuracy of both the New York Times article and Palantir's response to it. In doing so, we will also address the claim spreading on social media.
When two sides of a story publish conflicting accounts, the truth of the matter generally lies somewhere in the middle. Snopes' research suggested that was the case in this situation. Both the New York Times' reporting and Palantir's response omitted details relevant to the story at hand.
Snopes found the social media claim that Palantir was creating a master database of all U.S. citizens was an exaggerated version of the New York Times article's headline, which oversimplified the situation.
Here's what we found:
Palantir is a company that lies at the crossroads of Silicon Valley and the Pentagon. Founded by Peter Thiel, Alexander Karp, Stephen Cohen and Joe Lonsdale in 2003, the company's website describes its mission as making "products for human-driven analysis of real-world data."
The company's founders and data tools are very Silicon Valley — Thiel co-founded PayPal alongside Elon Musk (until recently the figurehead of the Trump administration's cost-cutting Department of Government Efficiency initiative) and was also the first big investor in Facebook, for instance.
But Palantir's customer base is based around Washington, D.C. Public spending data showed the company has held government contracts since at least July 2008. The left-leaning newsroom More Perfect Union quoted Palantir CTO Shyam Shankar in 2021 saying that the company's goal was to become "the U.S. government's central operating system."
Different versions of the claim on social media listed the Palantir products Gotham and Foundry as the main ways the company was supposedly consolidating government data. Palantir's website describes Foundry as "Ontology-Powered Operating System for the Modern Enterprise" (it's an internet-based data management system) and Gotham as an "Operating system for global decision making." (It's designed for the military.) Based on those product descriptions, Foundry is the product of interest.
Palantir's response to the New York Times story acknowledged the company's extensive work with the U.S. federal government. However, it also aimed to distance itself from one of the most talked-about groups in the early months of Trump's second term — the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, which the tech billionaire Elon Musk spearheaded until late May.
The New York Times and WIRED previously reported that several DOGE staffers worked at Palantir before joining the initiative. More Perfect Union found other former Palantir employees working within Trump's administration as "foreign policy advisers" and "high-level technology appointees."
On June 5, 2025, WIRED published an article claiming that Palantir's head of strategic engagement, Eliano Younes, retaliated in reaction to WIRED's reporting on connections to the Trump administration by threatening to call the police on a WIRED reporter watching software demonstrations at Palantir's booth at the AI+ expo, a free and public event open to journalists.
In its response to the New York Times article, Palantir claimed that the New York Times and WIRED's reporting was misleading because "Palantir does not control where its employees go after leaving the company" and that attempts to draw connections between Palantir and the Trump administration "lend credence to a conspiracy to surveil the American public."
It is true that former employees of Palantir joining an administration isn't a sign of conspiracy. However, it is also true that at least one co-founder and co-owner of Palantir, Peter Thiel, is a man who has a business history with Musk and who helped bankroll the campaigns of both Vice President JD Vance and Trump.
The New York Times story found that since Trump took office, Palantir has received over $113 million in government contracts. Using USASpending, the publicly available database for federal government spending, Snopes found that Palantir received between $228 million and $542 million in government contracts per year between 2020 and 2024, mostly with the Defense Department. Palantir's response noted that many of those contracts dated back to previous administrations.
In 2025, however, the company earned its first billion-dollar contract with the Defense Department for a military surveillance system.
In short, Palantir does have connections with the Trump administration, although it has attempted to downplay them.
The federal government has a lot of data. An April 2025 story from the New York Times counted 314 different pieces of information various U.S. government agencies have on file for each citizen, and suggested the total was likely even higher.
On March 20, 2025, Donald Trump signed an executive order titled "Stopping Waste, Fraud, and Abuse by Eliminating Information Silos."
The May 30 New York Times story marked this executive order as a starting point for the consolidation of information.
But Palantir's response to this idea left out the most important stipulation in the order:
A close reading of the Executive Order is merited to better assess the intent and to observe the Order's language that specifically directs any data sharing efforts to align with existing legal authorities and procedural standards, and for the express purpose of addressing inefficiencies in government programs. Inefficiency, waste, fraud, and abuse reduction initiatives have been nonpartisan and regular focuses of multiple administrations. The statement draws on a vague rhetorical maneuver ("raising questions") to extrapolate from a common sense government initiative — that of IT modernization — to the presumption of nefarious and dystopian intent.
Describing the executive order as solely an "IT modernization" initiative is highly misleading, even when acknowledging the fact that information technology systems are listed in the executive order.
The executive order's "purpose" section reads:
Removing unnecessary barriers to Federal employees accessing Government data and promoting inter‑agency data sharing are important steps toward eliminating bureaucratic duplication and inefficiency while enhancing the Government's ability to detect overpayments and fraud.
It instructed all federal agencies to ensure that "Federal officials designated by the President or Agency Heads (or their designees) [had] full and prompt access to all unclassified agency records, data, software systems, and information technology systems."
In simple words, the executive order stated that if the president, or anyone authorized by the president (say, a member of an initiative explicitly created by that president to reduce government waste and fraud), asked for unclassified data, agencies had to provide it.
It is true, as Palantir's response noted, that programs targeting "inefficiency, waste, fraud and abuse" have been non-partisan, and that the executive order includes wording about the legal framework. It is also true that the executive order does not explicitly mention DOGE by name.
But the executive order, without naming DOGE, still gives the agency enormous power.
DOGE's employees are federal employees. According to an interview then-DOGE figurehead Musk gave Fox News, the government is defrauded when "the computer systems don't talk to each other." Using Musk's own rationale, DOGE would therefore need to make the computer systems talk to each other (read: allow one computer system to access data from another system) in order to combat fraud.
The agency's strategy of "move fast and break things" seems to ignore whether the actions it takes are legal, based on the dozens of lawsuits filed against the initiative. (DOGE supporters, of course, can claim those lawsuits are without merit, but that argument is outside the scope of this story.)
Indeed, DOGE has attempted to interlink the various government systems, according to previous reporting from WIRED and CNN. Palantir's response to the New York Times story claimed those WIRED and CNN reports were also misleading because they helped "propagate similar inaccuracies about Palantir's actual work with U.S. government federal agencies," noting that the company has "no contracts with DOGE."
So, let's discuss that question.
USASpending listed every federal contract with Palantir dating back to 2008 as follows.
The following five departments or agencies all had contracts with Palantir totaling over $100 million:
Department of Defense
Department of Health and Human Services
Department of Homeland Security
Department of Justice
Department of Treasury
Five federal entities had contracts totaling between $10 and $100 million:
Department of Veterans Affairs
Department of Energy
Securities and Exchange Commission
Department of Transportation
Department of Agriculture
Finally, the following five had contracts totaling less than $10 million:
Department of Commerce ($4.5 million)
Department of State (just under $2 million)
General Services Administration ($750,000)
Department of Labor ($80,000)
Department of the Interior ($5,000)
Snopes reached out to all of those departments for comment. We received a response from the Department of Defense directing us to publicly available information on Palantir contracts we had already found. We also received a response from a senior Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) official saying, "Like other law enforcement agencies, ICE employs various forms of technology while respecting civil liberties and privacy interests."
The May 30 New York Times story claiming that Palantir had been tapped to consolidate data named the three biggest departments — Defense (DOD), Health and Human Services (HHS) and Homeland Security (DHS), as having Palantir contracts. (It did not specify when those contracts started.) That story also claimed that new contracts with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and Social Security Administration (SSA) might be coming soon. Palantir confirmed its work with the IRS in its response — since 2018, it has helped support "the agency's criminal investigative workflows."
A June story from the New York Times clarified that the Centers for Disease Control, the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration, all within HHS, use Palantir Foundry for data management.
So, no — Palantir does not have a direct contract with DOGE. However, the existence of a direct contract does not change the facts of WIRED's reporting about DOGE employees using Palantir's technology to centralize and connect government data sources.
The April 2025 reporting from WIRED and CNN claimed that DOGE was combining Homeland Security databases with information from the Social Security Administration (SSA) and voting records to create "a master database for immigration enforcement."
That WIRED story also noted that DOGE leaders at the IRS were attempting to create a system that would allow "privileged users to view all agency data from a central access point" using Foundry. The article stated that the Treasury Department denied having a contract for this work, but that "IRS engineers were invited to another three-day 'training and building session' on the project located at Palantir's Georgetown offices in Washington, DC." Several government IT personnel told WIRED that it would be "easy to connect the IRS's Palantir system with the ICE system at DHS."
In total, Palantir software certainly isn't used throughout the federal government, as noted in the company's response to the New York Times story. However, Foundry is reportedly used in the department that maintains databases on health, and if DOGE's work at the IRS is fully implemented, it could also be used to connect tax data and immigration data.
As for social security, in June, the U.S. Supreme Court issued two unsigned rulings allowing DOGE to access Social Security data and shield records from a watchdog organization. Whether or not Social Security data has been moved to Foundry is unknown.
Palantir's initial response claimed the company never "collects data to unlawfully surveil Americans."
The New York Times article never accused Palantir of breaking the law. Social media users replied to the company's statement pointing out that the word "unlawfully" could be doing a lot of heavy lifting, implying that Palantir was collecting data to surveil Americans legally.
Based on our research, this claim isn't true, because Palantir isn't the one collecting or storing the data — rather, the U.S. government is doing so. Furthermore, Palantir isn't the one attempting to compile or centralize that data — that's DOGE.
Palantir's response described their role as follows: "Our business is to provide our customers with the software capabilities to use their data effectively and in accordance to their legitimate mandates."
Assuming this is true, Palantir itself is not building any master database, as social media posts claimed. However, its powerful data tools could easily be used to construct such a database. The company acknowledged as much in its response:
As a company that focuses on building privacy and civil liberties protective technologies, as well as one that fosters a culture of open dialogue on controversial topics impacting our business, we consider many types of risks associated with our customer engagements and products in order to help avoid or mitigate concerns. There likely may still be residual risks of misuse for any product or tool, technical or otherwise. But our efforts to discuss, understand, and address such risks are one of the reasons that some of the most critical institutions in the world spanning public, private, and non-profit sectors trust Palantir and our products.
Furthermore, there is some evidence — based on Trump's executive order, statements from Elon Musk speaking about data consolidation, previous reporting from WIRED and CNN on how Homeland Security and ICE has created an immigrant database from multiple data sources and a recent decision by the Supreme Court that allows DOGE to access SSA data — that the administration is undertaking such an initiative. Palantir's Foundry, a tool to access government data, would only be a part of such an initiative.
Paraphrasing what a source within the SSA told WIRED in April, creating a network of computers and databases that DOGE can connect to is "more feasible and quicker than putting all the data in a single place, which is probably what they really want."
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